Hubs

NVIDIA Tegra 4 Slide Leak – Quad Core CPU with 72 Graphics Cores

A leaked NVIDIA Tegra 4 aka Wayne slide has emerged and it confirms all the rumors that we‘ve been hearing over the past few weeks. NVIDIA is upping the ante on graphics performance and will be offering a total of 72 GPU cores!

NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 will be built on the 28nm process and will offer NVIDIA’s patented 4-PLUS-1 architecture, ie a quad-core CPU with a fifth a “companion core”. Nvidia calls its approach “variable symmetric multiprocessing”, devices use the minimum amount of power necessary for all tasks therefore conserving battery life.

The addition of Dual Channel DDR3L memory was some how predictable. Support for hardware encode and de-encoding is limited 1440p. This kills the rumor that we were going to be seeing 4k encode and decode on Tegra 4.

Advanced Hardware Security Features have been added which is pretty exciting. We don’t know at this time if this might mean that we’ll be seeing “on the fly” AES encryption, but it’s something that would be nice.

On the GPU side we are seeing a 6x increase in the number of cores compared to Tegra 3 and we’ll be seeing the performance increase by a factor of 5.

Overall, we can expect Tegra 4 to be 10x as fast the still very popular Tegra 2 SOC which first pushed the envelope on mobile gaming. Things will also be looking up for Windows RT since many reviewers are complaining about performance limitations.

What we are still waiting for with Tegra 4 is the merger with the LTE! So it looks like we’re going to have to wait until the SOC with the code name Grey for that to happen. Mobile World Congress in Febrary isnt very far off and we should be hearing more about this development then.